Monday, November 24, 2008

Lack of Black and White Fabric

Paula - I can't believe that those are your only black & white prints...

I though I would answer her comment here as it helps to explain why this challenge is so appealing to me.

In my previous work life (and now in my consulting work) I do a significant amount of reviewing lines and lines of data and manipulate them to "say something" significant. There is a lot of "gray" work involved and a lot of intuition. The people who work me are very black and white analysts - if the data says "X" to them, then they say "X". It's next to impossible to get them to see the shades of gray in the data.

My fabric choices have always been colorful. I tend to avoid black and white because they seem so "definitive" to me. No room for movement. In fact, of the three FQs I showed in the photo I only bought the music notes and that's because I'm a musician. The other two I received in swaps.

For me the challenge of working in black and white with one other color is in following a set of simple rules and not look for the "gray" areas.

3 comments:

I'm not a black and white person either. I got a lot of black and whites for my 40th birthday. And, then I signed up for a noodle swap and got some more....otherwise, I probably wouldn't have any either! That's why it's really a challenge for some of us.

Paula, It makes lots of sense to me. My husband is very logical and a cut and dry kind of person. He seems to like 2 or 3 color quilts the best. In fact he love the black and white quilts that I make. However, when one has too much color or many different fabrics he does not like it very much. So I do think this will be a challenge for many because we are so used to using many colors. I can't wait to see what new black and whites you will purchase.